I was pleased to be asked to present this year’s keynote address at the annual Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society workshop. The theme this year was on infrastructures and so was a perfect fit for my new project on the global environmental history of computing.

The goal of this project is to explore the physical infrastructure that makes our online interactions possible, and to suggest that “computer power” is more than just a metaphor. From Bitcoin “mines” to server “farms” to data “warehouses,” computing requires the input of a range of materials and resources, from lithium and rare earth elements to coal, oil, gas, and uranium. Just as with more traditional forms of technological and industrial development, the information economy can be resource-intensive, pollution-producing, and potentially damaging to the environment, to humans, and to social and political relationships. In the SIGCIS presentation of this material, I outlined several approaches to integrating the methods and insights of environmental history into the history of computing.

For more information about this project and its future research agenda, see the Dirty Bits project site.

This fall I will be teaching for the first time our core I202: Introduction to Social Informatics course. This is a course that challenges students to think critically about technological change and acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the political, economic, and social considerations that underlie technological development. For more information, see the syllabus.

In addition, I will be once again offering I222: The Information Society.

Watch the trailer

The CODE documentary, directed by Robin Hauser, exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. CODE raises the question: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code?

CODE takes a hard look at the pipeline question in technology: why aren’t there more women and minority graduates in computer science? What is stopping them from getting to the threshold? CODE follows the various challenges faced by a new generation of women programmers and the ingenious ways they are using their skills, drive, intellect and vision to disrupt the traditional, male-dominated tech world.

CODE looks to the past, delving into the history of computing to highlight women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper who set the stage for today’s technology. CODE acknowledges that women have been an important part of computing since the genesis of computers, but have since been written out of this history.

First screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the CODE documentary has been showing to audiences across the country.

I was pleased to play a small role in the development of CODE, and appear briefly as a talking head. Filmed right here at the IMU!

On May 20, 2015 I will be presenting my work on the history of masculinity in the computing professions at the UCLA Historicizing Masculinities Colloquium.

The Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study has awarded me an Individual Research Award Grant for work on my forthcoming book on the environmental history of computing. Many thanks to the awards committee at the IAS for sponsoring this research.

The public radio show Backstory devoted an entire show to the history of Women at Work. One of the segments is called Binary Coeds: The Secret History of Women in Programming and features me and my work in this area. For more on this topic, you might also check out this recent post on The Computer Boys Take Over blog.

As of January 1, 2015 I will be taking over as the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. The Annals has served as the premier journal in the history of computing for thirty-five years, and has published articles by the finest historions, computer scientists and pioneers, and industry leaders in the world.

If you are a scholar working in the history of computing or information technology, consider submitting your work to the Annals.

I am pleased and honored to have been invited to give the 2015 Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture in the History of Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. I will be speaking on my recent work on the environmental history of computing. The title of the talk is The Materiality of the Virtual: A Global Environmental History of Computing from Babbage to Bitcoin. If you happen to be in Santa Barbara on January 21, 2015, please join me there!

My first book, The Computer Boys Take Over, has been attracting attention in the news recently, largely because of its discussion of gender and computer programming. This article in Fastcompany on the “Evolution of Brogramming” discusses my work in relation to the forthcoming documentary CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap. In their insightful review of sexism in the tech industry in The Baffler (entitled “The Dads of Tech”), Astra Taylor and Joanne McNeil situate my historical work in the context of recent incidents of sexism such as GamerGate.

Update: I titled my first book after its central characters, adopting a contemporary term for these new specialists — “the computer boys” — that for me neatly captured mixed sense of awe, mystery, suspicion, and derision with which this unexpected powerful new group of experts were regarded by their contemporaries. Like the other terms collectively applied to these experts (“wizards,” “hackers,” “gurus,” and “cowboys”) the term “computer boys” spoke to the ways in which these specialists were alternatively admired for their technical prowess and despised for their eccentric mannerisms and the disruptive potential of the technologies they developed. To many observers in this period , it seemed the “computer boys” were taking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society in general.

But there is another, more literal sense in which “the computer boys took over,” and has to do with the masculinization of computer culture that occurred over the course of the late 1950s and 1960s. It often surprises people to learn that computer programming was originally envisioned as women’s work, and that it took several decades for computing to acquire its distinctively masculine identity.

In both the Computer Boys book and a subsequent essay in the edited volume Gender Codes (which focused on the astonishing 1967 Cosmopolitan Magazine Computer Girls article pictured above) I wrote about the remarkable occupational sex-change that occurred in the history of the computer professions. I focused particularly on the ways in which the widespread use of aptitude testing and personality profiles in hiring practices in this period helped create and reinforce the stereotype of the computer programmer as young, male, and anti-social.

I now in the process of extending my history of gender and computing to cover the period between the late 1960s and early 1980s. I have a new article coming out in the forthcoming special issue of Osiris dedicated to scientific masculinities. The article is called ‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions. The focus of this piece is on the emergence of the “computer bum” in academic computer labs in the late 1970s and its subsequent popularization of this almost exclusively male phenomenon in the sensationalist media coverage of the “computer hacker” in the early 1980s.

Update: the published Osiris version of the Beards and Sandals paper is now available.

But while this new piece focuses processes of masculinization, the underlying assumption is, of course, that there is a larger history of women in computing against which these processes are revealed. It is too early to reveal much about the forthcoming Osiris paper, but in honor of Ada Lovelace day, here is one of my favorite lines from the new work:

… to borrow a relevant metaphor from computer programming itself, the presence of women in early computing was a feature, not a bug.

It is very exciting how much to see how much is happening in the history of computing in celebration of this day (and in anticipation of future celebrations), from historical documentaries on the ENIAC programmers and Grace Hopper to events aimed at encouraging women in computing.